A technical writer for all seasons

Even in the day of mobile devices and Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), organizations can’t escape the need to review business and technical documents for accuracy, completeness, and message. I’ve been a student of technical document reviews, for much of my career. In fact, I was a computer book technical reviewer during the great computer book over-publishing of the nineties.

Here are some time for managing document reviews if you are on a geographically dispersed team:

Centralize documents online

Teams should place their documents in a central document repository whether it be SharePoint, Huddle, Dropbox, Box, or in your project management applications. Emailing review documents back and forth invites version conflicts.

Establish review guidelines

Truth be told, many organizations don’t know how to review and approve a document. As such, it is important to set out how you want your reviewers to check over each document. Your review guidelines should:

Instruct the reviewers to follow procedures step-by-step.

Tell them to point out incorrect steps and identify why the step is in error.

Encourage the reviewers to look for better ways to present data, or identify if a different function or listing that would work better in the same situation.

Instruct reviewers to check to see if the artwork (listings, figures, illustrations, and tables) corresponds with the references in the text.

Tell the reviewers to test each line of program code and describe any problems.

Designate document stakeholders

Have a designated document stakeholder check over the document(s) undergoing review to help set review priorities and free up resources to ensure the review happens on deadline. The stakeholders can also tie the document review into the overall project plan if needed.

Identify primary and backup reviewers as a first step when project teams span multiple time zones and even continents. If the primary reviewer is unavailable to resolve a question, then the team can always go to the backup reviewer.

Set a realistic review schedule.

It is rare that a stressed and harried project team can make a full document review in just one pass. So depending on your project schedule, take the initiative to manage expectations and set a review schedule that ensures reviewers are going to add value to the documents they are reviewing.

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Published by Will Kelly

Will Kelly is a technical writer living and working in the Washington, DC area. After years of contracting, he returned to full-time corporate job in 2016. He writes thought leadership content around cloud, enterprise mobility, and cybersecurity topics. Will's has written for Samsung Business Insights, Tom's IT Pro, TechBeacon, CNET TechRepublic, and other sites. Earlier in his career, he wrote technical documentation for end users, developers, and operations teams. His current areas of interest include multi-cloud solutions, mobile security, and managed services. Follow Will on Twitter: @willkelly.
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